Trapeze

Narrator: You should be looking at the trapeze. Calder put hooks on the acrobats’ hands and feet. He made the trapezes swing at the same time, so the acrobats traveled from one to the other on their own.

Real circus performers must build these routines into their muscle memory, until they can do them without fear. Sarah Schwarz tells us how.

Sarah Schwartz: Well, my first advice is, “Practice, practice, practice!” [Laughs] You just gotta do it and do it and do it and do it. It’s an exercise of concentration, really. And I tell my students that it’s going to help them in school, too, because it’s really great exercise on your concentration.

And you always have the risk to fall. The public always wait for that. Always. Most of us, the circus artists, we like to show very difficult things to look very easy. So people will never get an idea how difficult it is, what I’m doing.